Technical Field
This invention pertains to the field of information processing, particularly to techniques for managing execution of multiple concurrent, multi-task software programs on parallel processing hardware.
Descriptions of the Related Art
Conventional microprocessor and computer system architectures rely on system software for handling runtime matters relating to sharing processing resources among multiple application programs and their instances, tasks etc., as well as orchestrating the concurrent (parallel and/or pipelined) execution between and within the individual applications sharing the given set of processing resources. However, the system software consumes by itself ever increasing portions of the system processing capacity, as the number of applications, their instances and tasks and the pooled processing resources would grow, as well as the more frequently the optimizations of the dynamic resource management among the applications and their tasks would be needed to be performed, in response to variations in the applications' and their instances' and tasks' processing loads etc. variables of the processing environment. As such, the conventional approaches for supporting dynamic execution of concurrent programs on shared processing capacity pools will not scale well.
This presents significant challenges to the scalability of the networked utility (‘cloud’) computing model, in particular as there will be a continuously increasing need for greater degrees of concurrent processing also at intra-application levels, in order to enable increasing individual application on-time processing throughput performance, without the automatic speed-up from processor clock rates being available due to the practical physical and economic constraints faced by the semiconductor etc. physical hardware implementation technologies.
To address the challenges per above, there is a need for inventions enabling scalable, multi-application dynamic concurrent execution on parallel processing systems, with high resource utilization efficiency, high application processing on-time throughput performance, as well built-in, architecture based security and reliability.